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Research paper tips from QuestiaTue, 03 Mar 2015 17:28:25 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Hackers target New York Times and China — Will cyber attacks increase?http://blog.questia.com/2013/09/hackers-target-new-york-times-china-will-cyber-attacks-increase/
http://blog.questia.com/2013/09/hackers-target-new-york-times-china-will-cyber-attacks-increase/#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2013 15:51:57 +0000http://blog.questia.com/?p=4365The last month has not been good for the Internet, with the websites of several major news organizations, including CNN, being hacked as well as most recently the sites of the New York Times and Twitter. But what is bad for online media just shows the growing power of hackers around the world. The attacks have also included a large part of the Internet in China during late August, in what is being called that country’s largest ever hack. The subjects of cyber attacks and security breaches are perfect research topics for your next computer science or technology course. Read on to learn more about computer hackers targeting the New York Times, CNN, Twitter, and more.

News organizations hacked

The New York Times website apparently first began encountering trouble around 3:00 p.m. EST on August 27, 2013, according to Twitter users. Heather Kelly updated on August 28, 2013, “Attack shuts down New York Times’ website” for CNN.com, that the attacks were believed to be caused by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group of hackers who are aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

While this is not the first time the SEA hacker group has targeted members of the U.S. media, it does appear that this most recent cyber attack has taken on a new degree of sophistication. The group attacked the New York Times domain name registrar. Kelly quotes New York Times chief information officer Marc Frons as saying “It’s sort of like breaking into the local savings and loan versus breaking into Fort Knox. A domain registrar should have extremely tight security because they are holding the security to hundreds if not thousands of websites.”

A Twitter account that claimed to be the official account for the Syrian Electronic Army stated that the group had hacked into Twitter as well. Kelly reported that Twitter confirmed a “DNS issue with one of the domains used to host images.”

Around the world

Sunday, August 25, 2013, China experienced a cyber attack on a massive portion of its Internet. The blog RT.com posted on August 27, 2013, “‘Largest hack’ in Chinese history has Beijing stumped,” about the incident. The outages were reported by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a government institution, that “said they were the result of twin denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks occurring in close succession, starting at 2:00 a.m. local time (6:00 p.m. GMT). The second attack was “long-lasting and large-scale,” Chinese state media reported.”

The irony is that China is no stranger to committing its own cyber attacks, including major DDoS hacks of its own. RT.com states in the same post that “In the first quarter of 2013, China was listed as the top source country for such attacks, according to a survey by security vendor Prolexic. The US ranked second on the list.” In fact, both countries have accused each other of large-scale cyber-espionage in the past. The tension between China and the U.S. in relation to cyber attacks only intensified with the recent revelations by Edward Snowden that the U.S. National Security Agency’s hackers had targeted China in the past.

Cyber attacks on the increase

As with all things technology-based, hackers and cyber attacks are rapidly developing with the times. ITBusiness offered a look at the changing tide of cyber attacks and what hackers are capable of in a slide show “The Evolution of Cyber Attacks.” The post states that “The cyber criminal community has evolved from pranksters, lone wolves and organized gangs to nation-states and hacktivist groups whose primary results have been increased costs and lost productivity.”

In the late 1990s, the biggest computer-based issues we faced were worms and viruses. Less than two decades later, cyber attacks have evolved:

According to the ITBusiness slideshow, “100 percent of over 2,300 global 2000 organizations surveyed acknowledged having attacks on keys and certificates in the last two years.” And the newest cyber attack of choice offers a wide reach, low visibility, few tools for responding to attacks and give hackers privileged status within the organization’s website. The result is that not only has the work of hackers grown, but also that cyber attacks are now often going unnoticed.

How we learn has been a hot topic for as long as man has been trying to gain knowledge. Methods come and go, but we never seem to reach a definitive answer as to the best way for educators to teach students. Technology and teaching have collided in the latest methodology to gain attention—adaptive learning. Could this replace educators and be the future of education?

What is adaptive learning?

So what exactly is adaptive learning? Paul Fain wrote “Intel on Adaptive Learning” April 4, 2013, for insidehighered.com and said the approach could be “loosely defined as data-driven tools that can help professors mold coursework around individual students’ abilities.”

Sound great, right? Well colleges are struggling to figure out which companies offering adaptive learning strategies are right for them and how to incorporate them. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation conducted a study to help, which analyzed the various vendors and what their various companies were capable of. Included in the study was “a chart for marking off the scale, scope and sophistication of adaptivity by each company,” Fain writes. The chart shows, “for example, if the technology can be used as a study aid, supplemental instruction for a course, or as an entire course.”

Best way of teaching?

Perhaps the most well-known of the adaptive learning companies, for the moment, is Knewton. What began as an online test prep service, according to Jill Barshay’s July 7, 2013 article for wired.com, “Q&A With Knewton’s David Kuntz, Maker of Algorithms That Replace Some Teacher Work,” has become a “big data machine [that] is the hidden engine inside the online courses provided by Pearson or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt or directly by a school, such as Arizona State University and University of Alabama.”

Kuntz shares with Barshay that “The question our machine is trying to answer is, of all of the content that’s available to me in the system, what’s the best thing to teach you next that maximizes the probability of you understanding the big things that you need to know?” He adds, “It’s not just what you should learn next, but how you should learn it.”

Knewton has mathematical models that look at how a student learns, what they are engaged by, what bores them, what they are proficient at and what frustrates them. This information is filtered to create a recommendation for what will help the student learn the subject at hand. The method seems to be particularly effective in the areas of math and science.

Results at colleges

Adaptive learning is not meant to replace teachers, per se, merely to help students learn at their own pace and allow teachers to spend time helping individuals or small groups as needed. Arizona State University adopted the technology via Knewton in the summer of 2011. According to an article in the July 7, 2013 issue of Newsweek, “What If You Could Learn Everything?” by Anya Kamenetz, the results have been very positive for ASU. “After two semesters of use, course withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates went from 64 percent to 75 percent.”

Kamenetz shared a comment Irene Bloom, a math lecturer at ASU, made on an education blog about the effectiveness of the program. Bloom said, “I have so much more information about what my students do (or don’t do) outside of class. I can see where they are stuck, how fast they are progressing, and how much time and effort they are putting into learning mathematics.”

Adaptive learning’s future

Researchers are already thinking of other ways they can create adaptive learning software that, if it doesn’t replace educators, will definitely aid teachers. Ki Mae Heussner blogged for Gigaom.com about efforts to design software that monitors students’ facial expressions. The July 28, 2013 post, “Frustrated? Confused? Learning software could watch your face for signals and match content to your emotions,” shared how researchers at North Carolina State University have built a software package that can predict how effective an online tutoring session was “based on what the students’ facial expressions indicated about their emotions.”

The idea is that this kind of emotion-sensing technology would work well with adaptive learning and be just one more way to help determine how well students are learning. Joseph Grafsgaard, a Ph.D. student at NCSU and lead author of the paper, doesn’t see the automated facial expression recognition program replacing teachers however. Rather he feels that the point of adaptive learning is to complement the efforts of educators, not replace them.

Want to learn more about the future of education? Check out Questia —particularly the section on education.

What do you think? Is adaptive learning the future? Will it help teachers and students or hurt the learning process? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.